The Deliverance (2024)

Lee Daniels has spent his career treating domestic melodrama as a species of horror, so a possession picture was always going to come down to emphasis. In The Deliverance, the emphasis lands on Ebony Jackson, a single mother played by Andra Day, who is drinking, broke, and one bad night away from losing three children to the state. The demon in the basement is nearly an afterthought. Daniels has said as much himself, noting that the tension that interested him was whether Ebony would beat her kids, not the thing scratching behind the closet door. The streaming service wanted scares. He supplied a few. The finished object sits uneasily between the two impulses.

The cast is Black from top to bottom, and the film never announces this as an accomplishment. It simply is. Andra Day carries the picture with a performance of frayed, unglamorous endurance, flanked by Glenn Close doing something strange with a Pittsburgh accent and Mo'Nique as a caseworker nursing a grudge. The Child Protective Services thread is the sharpest instrument here, a low hum of institutional scrutiny that lands differently when the family under the microscope is Black, though the script declines to say so out loud. Miss Lawrence appears in the ensemble. No queer material follows her onto the screen.

Where the film raises its voice, it raises it in church. The climax is a full Pentecostal deliverance: speaking in tongues, anointing oil, a sinner's prayer, stigmata blooming on the teenagers' palms. This is melodrama aimed at the rafters, not instruction aimed at the audience, and that distinction keeps the sermonizing tolerable. The pacing sags. The theology is sincere. It is a messy, overstuffed, occasionally gripping piece of work from a director who has never met a restraint he respected. The house gets demolished in the end. Something in the area keeps knocking anyway.